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Tuesday, September 1, 2015

THE TRUTH IS COMING ~ WRITING LIE CATCHERS

Of the fifteen books I’ve written, my latest novel, LIE CATCHERS,
is the most personal and unique. Having spent thirty-five years with the LAPD
and thirty years as a professional writer, I am a sturdy branch on the
genealogy tree of police writers. Other cop-author branches on the tree include
William Caunitz (NYPD), Joseph McNamara (San Jose PD), Sonny Grosso (NYPD), and
a plethora of others (for a full list CLICK HERE). The LAPD, however, has
always led the way when it comes to police writers, including such luminaries
as Dallas Barnes, Kathy Bennett, Gene Roddenberry (yes, that Gene Roddenberry),
and almost 100 others (CLICK HERE). LAPD, of course, was
also where the heavyweight champ of police writers, Joseph Wambaugh, hung his
shoulder holster.

With that kind of professional ancestry, it was pretty much a
given I would also do a Wambaugh when
it came to writing novels. I have written books in other genres, westerns, an
Elvis-is-not–dead novel, soccer mysteries, and boxing noirs, but cop dramas
have always constituted the largest part of my output.Fey Croaker, the heroine of the five book series in which
she is featured, is a unique character, but the novels themselves follow the
traditional sequence of mystery or police procedurals – there’s a murder, it’s
a whodunit, the quirky detective doggedly works to untangle the morass of red
herrings and false clues and, eventually, slaps the cuffs on the perpetrator.
This is not a bad thing, but I wanted Lie
Catchers to be something more. I wanted to take the reader into a world
they only thought they knew and turn them on their heads.During my LAPD career, I spent over twenty-five years
investigating sex crimes. For fifteen of those years, I ran the Operations West
Bureau–Sexual Assault Detail (OWB-SAD) – a unit of thirty detectives
investigating all sex crimes in an area covering twenty-five percent of the
city. This extensive jurisdiction included Hollywood Area, where anything that
could happen sexually usually did.From its formation, OWB-SAD consistently maintained the
highest sex crimes clearance rate and number of detective initiated arrests in the city. We were busy, but what made
us far more successful than the other sex crimes details in the city was our
attention to interrogations.

Every interrogation we did was videotaped, reviewed, and
critiqued. We developed many different techniques, both in the box and on the streets. Our byword was the belief the
interrogation room wasn’t a place, it was wherever an OWB-SAD detective
happened to be – the suspect’s home or workplace, in a car, in a coffee shop,
literally anywhere. This was interrogation as it had never been approached
before.

For good detectives, it’s not the cases we crack that
matter, it’s the ones we don’t that haunt us. I now teach week-long
interrogation classes to experienced detectives at wide variety of law
enforcement agencies. Invariably, several detectives in the class have an
epiphany. They think back to a case where they couldn’t get to the truth and
realize they could have done so if they’d had these types of techniques – which
are all part of a tactical approach to interrogation.As a novelist, I finally had my own interrogation epiphany.
I realized, I’d never seen or read anything dealing with interrogation in a
realistic manner. Books don’t get it right. Movies and TV certainly don’t get
it right – not even the real cop shows like 48
Hours. However, with my background and experiences, I was in a
unique position to write an interrogation themed novel and make it as realistic
as fiction would allow. Lie Catchers
is the result.I didn’t want Lie Catchers
to be just another whodunit murder mystery. I wanted to give the reader an
intimate experience – much like the world created between a detective and a
suspect in the box. To accomplish
that goal, I knew the third person
narrative voice I’d used for the Fey Croaker novels would not work. For Lie Catchers, I had to get inside the
head of one of the main characters and tell the story in the first person.﻿﻿

ORIGINAL COVER ART JOSEPH HAYES

﻿Lie Catchers
features two top LAPD interrogators, Ray Pagan and Calamity Jane Randall. Telling the story from Ray Pagan’s
perspective just didn’t feel right. One of Pagan’s qualities is the unusual
ways in which he approaches situations. This was best experienced from the
point of view of another character who would come to understand Pagan along
with the reader. This put me, as the writer, inside the head of Calamity Jane Randall – a very good
detective, but still a woman who doesn’t truly understand herself. To become a
great detective, a great interrogator, she needs Pagan to lead her on the path
to self-discovery. However, Pagan also needs Randall – for many reason, which
become clear in the narrative, but most of all to save him from himself.I didn’t want Pagan and Randall simply to be a riff on
Holmes and Watson. I wanted their dynamic to be an equal partnership. Randall isn’t
just there to assist and marvel at Pagan’s brilliance – a foil used to listen
while Pagan explained his cleverness. Randall is her own woman with her own
strengths. Yes, sometimes Pagan acts as a mentor, but I wanted there to be an
equal number of times when Randall’s actions saved the day. Jane was a leader,
not just a follower.But here was the challenge. As a male, writing in the third
person about a female main character like Fey Croaker was one thing. Actually
getting inside Jane Randall’s head to tell the story from her perspective as a
woman was entirely another.I had been living with the characters of Pagan and Randall
in my brain for quite a while before I started writing Lie Catchers. As I prepared to start tapping out words, I was
surprised to find I actually knew more about Jane than I did about Pagan.Jane was a touch more tentative, a little less self-aware,
than Fey Croaker. She was no less of a detective, but her approach was much
more stealthy. Fey reacts, charging
into situations until she crushed them. Jane quickly assesses situations and responds – achieving her goal with a
minimum of shattered glass. Interrogation is all about becoming the person the suspect needs you to be in order to confess.
You can’t do that by reacting…You
have to be able to respond. Jane’s
style complimented the skills she needed to become a great interrogator.Jane also needed to tell her story, her way. Unless you are
a writer, you can’t understand the joy and the amazement of experiencing a
fictional character completely taking over your narrative. It is as if they are
an entity inside you, knowing all your secrets, each skeleton in your closet.
Every day, they force you to sit down at the keyboard and then take charge of
your fingers to tap out their story in staccato bursts of channeled energy. Through this process, Lie
Catchers became something more than just a story. It became an experience. All of the interrogation
techniques within the pages are as real as I could make them, but the emotions
and intensity – the intimacy I wanted
to establish between characters and readers – were all sparked by Jane Randall
and Ray Pagan.My name is on the cover of Lie Catchers, but it’s Randall and Pagan’s story. They are your
personal guides into the continent of darkness which lies in the soul of the art of interrogation. You couldn’t be in
better hands.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Novelist, screenwriter, and television personality, Paul Bishop spent 35 years with the Los Angeles Police Department, where he was twice honored as Detective of the Year.He continues to work privately as an interrogation and deception expert. His fifteen novels include five in his LAPD Homicide Detective Fey Croaker series. His latest novel, Lie Catchers, begins a new series featuring top LAPD interrogators Ray Pagan and Calamity Jane Randall.